Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked...I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich....“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections....Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends - are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious - we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!"

I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked...I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich....“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections....Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends - are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious - we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!"

April 29, 2009

Over the weekend I was talking with someone about memories of Summer camp. One of the strongest (other than a general feeling of dread and an incomprehension of how I was sent away so you and so far away) is how we swam for our lives after someone screamed "shark". This was in the freezing cold waters of a Maine Lake that was also filled with leaches and water snakes that lived under the pontoons of the pier. I was just thinking about that conversation when I read a really interesting post on Kottke.org about a possible future for photography. Linked from that post was this video. Thankfully YouTube wasn't around then.

April 28, 2009

On Sunday we went to see our friend Lizzie Scott's performance piece, the Styrene Fantastic, in the Movement Research Spring Festival. We headed out into the heat with me carrying W in a backpack not sure of what would happen. The festival was billed as a parade and we thought it would wind itself down Orchard Street and the galleries of the LES. Instead it turned out that it was actually a bunch of little performances in gallery spaces, which changed the logistics somewhat. We didn't want a hot and cranky 20 month old to ruin it for everone, so we carefully sat near the door. Much to our amazement however W sat rapt with attention with her hands around my neck with not a peep except for her amazing laugh when the dancers took pratfalls. It was a funny piece and her laughter woke up the crowd. A woman behind us told us she "was remarkable" and we couldn't have agreed more. B thinks it is because she met the dancers beforehand and because it was fairly short at 9 minutes. In any case it was a special moment. After the performance we went to get Malaysian food with B and I just beaming all the way. The performance was great too.

April 21, 2009

I'm not sure where I read this morning about how HARO is earning 1 million a year in revenue from the little ads that appear in the 3x daily newsletter's of reporter queries for experts but it is the kind of simple and nice business that I wish I had thought of and were running. You could do it from anywhere once it got going.

I have several close friends who write about food and who also occasionally appear on television, so this article caught my eye as I expect my friends either know or know of this guy. As I read it however I began thinking about the saying "with friends like these who needs enemies." I think the article is meant to be complimentary, but to me, it reads like anything but, and by the end I felt sorry for the subject. Maybe I'm misreading it, but the author does him no favors from calling him stocky and a "prowling bear", having his asst chime in like Jack Donaghy's on 30 Rock, centering the story around his upbringing in a family that had some financial struggles and how those lessons make him who he is, quoting a long Bruce Springsteen song, and having Rachel Ray speculate on his self-worth. Is it really a compliment when a SVP at your company says he "has a little bit of street edge in him...some of us are more refined." Maybe all press is good press but I don't think so.

Received some really nice news last night from Susan Mernit. She has won a 2009 New Voices grant from the J-Lab with support from the Knight Foundation and is going to use the money to kickstart Oakland Local in the Fall. The site will be "a daily-updated Web site and mobile service with
a focus on environment, climate, transportation, housing, local
government and community activism in Downtown, Uptown, North Oakland,
West Oakland, Fruitvale, Lake Merritt, and the Diamond District." It will have a small staff; editor, publisher, paid part-time reporters, and community contributors. While one would expect Susan to create an extraordinary new local site given her background, as one the leading experts in online news (she co-founded NJ Online with Jeff Jarvis in 1995), and social media, for me it is the focus on the issues that create the fabric and reality of place that is so interesting in this effort. She writes

"For me, the Oscar Grant shooting were a transformative factor in
applying for this grant. I saw that there was a gap in reporting that
none of the blogs or local news outlets, as good as they might be,
actually filled--and that lots of the best discussion was happening in
smaller groups, on the margins, where people new to Oakland (like
myself) or people who were not part of a particular community, might
not have access to that information. The vision here is to marry a
deeper aggregation of community and non-profit content with more
considered, analytical coverage of a narrow set of issues that have
huge resonance for so many people in the O--and see what we can learn
from the mix.

It will be really exciting to see this take shape and to see if she can pull the disparate and at times competing local groups into one place to create a force.

I'm not sure where I read this morning about how HARO is earning 1 million a year in revenue from the little ads that appear in the 3x daily newsletter's of reporter queries for experts but it is the kind of simple and nice business that I wish I had thought of and were running. You could do it from anywhere once it got going.

I have several close friends who write about food and who also occasionally appear on television, so this article caught my eye as I expect my friends either know or know of this guy. As I read it however I began thinking about the saying "with friends like these who needs enemies." I think the article is meant to be complimentary, but to me, it reads like anything but, and by the end I felt sorry for the subject. Maybe I'm misreading it, but the author does him no favors from calling him stocky and a "prowling bear", having his asst chime in like Jack Donaghy's on 30 Rock, centering the story around his upbringing in a family that had some financial struggles and how those lessons make him who he is, quoting a long Bruce Springsteen song, and having Rachel Ray speculate on his self-worth. Is it really a compliment when a SVP at your company says he "has a little bit of street edge in him...some of us are more refined." Maybe all press is good press but I don't think so.

an article whose thesis is that modern running shoes cause a lot of ailments and injuries and that running in more basic and thin shoes will fix them. i've just started running again and have already had a calf injury and am going to think about this article. A side note on this article however is just how terrible the HED is, no clue as to the contents. Too bad.

If I were working more and therefore allowed by Ms. B to purchase something large that we really don't need I think this Octopus triptych, featured on Coolhunting, would be on the list. Click through to see other animals and where to purchase it should you find yourself more unfettered by frugality.

"The Mooresville, N.C.-based home improvement retailer says 84% of homeowners are planning a lawn or garden project in the next 12 months, 82% plan to do interior painting, 65% will paint exteriors, 56% are putting in new flooring and 55% are either remodeling or adding a bathroom....And while 35% concede the main reason they're DIY-ing is to save money, a surprising 32% gave "pleasure" as the main motivator. And yes, that extends to a complex relationship with the lawn: 80% cut their own grass, and intend to keep doing so. "

I just started reading Michael Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and am in the beginning of the book immersed in corn. So it was a really nice coincidence to see Brownstoner's link to a story and photos from inside the abandoned Red Hook Grain Terminal. If you've ever spent any time out in Red Hook you can't miss the
terminal. It looms over the ball fields and you can see it from the
Ikea. Though it held grain for the various Brooklyn Breweries and not corn, I still think of it as a local reminder of the connection to the industrial complex that he describes. It is a visual tie to when Red Hook and the Brooklyn waterfront was one of the largest ports in the country.

I've always wanted to be the type of person who would go with a friend into a neat abandoned iconic building but I've been to frightened; of getting into trouble, of crossing hostile squatters, of getting injured out of range. So when I read about exploits like this, or trespassing on the Highline, or exploring the smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island I read them eagerly. Hell, when you still could, I never rode the 6 around to see the City Hall station though I have postcards of it. The Grain Terminal is dangerous, the chutes go down 10+ stories, so Herman Yung's account is a good read for this armchair urban explorer. But he is only the latest urban archaeologist to do it. Jake Dobkin was there in 2007 and an old article in Curbed has a list of others.

April 14, 2009

The NYT covers patch, everyblock, placeblogger, and mentions outside.in in an interesting but flawed article. I think the reporter confuses the terms hyperlocal and local. People seem to be using them interchangeably. Nice to see a focus on EveryBlock along with a big photo of Adrian Holovaty. They have built a great site with a nice ui that is full of detailed feeds. As their grant $ runs out expect to hear something from them in the next month or two. The coverage of Patch was really interesting. I don't think the reporter gets it Patch is a local play- a new kind of suburban newspaper chain, a smart template aimed at the heart of papers owned by some of the larger newspaper companies Too bad the reporter takes issue with the lack of detail in Everyblock's crime data. The NYT doesn't have a crime blotter of any kind. I recently saw a great film on current.tv about the LA Times's murder blog which tracks down the detail on all of the murders in LA which hadn't been covered before.

In my household, as in many others, frugality is the rule of the day. One thing for which we make a small exception (for now) is our whiskey. While do moderate its rate of consumption we are still addicted to the peatier variety from the Scotland. So the other day after I bought a new bottle of Laphroig, I noticed that it came with the offer of a leasehold on a foot square plot of Islay. Normally I wouldn't bother reading the little booklet in the canister but...well, I was bored. It isn't a real leasehold with rights of ownership; peat cutting, grazing, or mining, but I do get a yearly rent in the form of a free dram if I visit. I don't quite understand the promotion since I'm already a fan but I think the whole thing is sort of cute. The online thank you gives you a satellite view with your plot and then they send the certificate by post. If Talisker were to come down in price then perhaps the fact that I'm a leaseholder might sway me to stick with them but mostly on a cold Spring day it is nice to fantasize about tromping around in big boots with a map, warmed by my rent.